Abstract
360° video requires human viewers to actively control
“where” to look while watching the video. Although it provides a more immersive experience of the visual content, it
also introduces additional burden for viewers; awkward interfaces to navigate the video lead to suboptimal viewing
experiences. Virtual cinematography is an appealing direction to remedy these problems, but conventional methods
are limited to virtual environments or rely on hand-crafted
heuristics. We propose a new algorithm for virtual cinematography that automatically controls a virtual camera
within a 360° video. Compared to the state of the art, our
algorithm allows more general camera control, avoids redundant outputs, and extracts its output videos substantially
more efficiently. Experimental results on over 7 hours of
real “in the wild” video show that our generalized camera
control is crucial for viewing 360° video, while the proposed
efficient algorithm is essential for making the generalized
control computationally tractable.